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Concrete canoe team finishes 4th in national competition

WKU’s concrete canoe team finished fourth in the 2016 national competition.

The finish equaled the concrete canoe team’s best ever in the national competition. WKU also finished fourth in 2002 and 2007.

WKU’s Bar-B-Qrete finished third in oral presentation, third in design paper, fifth in final product and ninth in race points during the June 9-11 competition at the University of Texas at Tyler.

The overall top five finishers were École de technologie supérieure, Montreal; University of California, Los Angeles; University of Nevada, Reno; WKU; and University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“At the national competition we had to be our absolute best to achieve our goal of a top 10 finish,” said Professor Matthew Dettman, faculty advisor. “The oral presentation team delivered an amazing presentation. The design paper was as fine a technical document as we could produce, and our paddlers did an outstanding job to get us some points on the water. Exceeding all expectations they delivered an amazing fourth-place finish overall. I cannot say enough about this team. Not only did we build an outstanding canoe this year, we built a group of fine young engineers that WKU can be proud of.”

WKU won the Ohio Valley Student Conference in April to advance to the its second straight national competition and its 15th overall. WKU finished 17th in the 2015 national competition.

“As the concrete canoe team advisor for 24 years now, each team faces its own unique set of challenges over the course of the year designing and building their canoe,” Dettman said. “This year, it seemed the team had to overcome more obstacles than any other I’ve coached and time and time again they overcame adversity and just got stronger as a team.

“Using a concrete mix that had never been tried before, the team faced unique technical challenges that forced them to pour three canoes before they built one that could withstand the rigors of the competition. When it came time to submit our design paper, issues with printers forced the team to hand deliver the paper to Cincinnati to get it there in time. In the regional competition, we struggled in the first few races, but in the last race of the day I knew we needed a win to advance to the national championships and they delivered the win.

“Even on the trip to the national competition, we experienced a flat tire on the trailer and a blown transmission on the truck. Each time this team faced a challenge, they didn’t complain they just fixed the problem.”

WKU Biologist Nancy Rice will be talking about “The Magic, Mystery and Misfortune of Modern Kenya” in WKU Libraries’ Far Away Places series on Thursday, February 22 at 7 p.m. at Barnes & Noble Bookstore.

Twenty-five undergraduate and graduate students from the Ogden College of Science & Engineering earned honors at the research competition held during the Kentucky Academy of Science's annual meeting in November.

Shelby Bandel, a graduate student in Psychological Sciences at WKU, is a recipient of a 2017 Graduate Research Scholarship from the American Psychological Foundation (APF) and the Council of Graduate Departments of Psychology.